Recently I, and several of my coworkers, were let go from Endless as they continue look for ways to accomplish their mission of empowering the world with technology. I was with Endless for right at one year, though it seems much longer than that. During my brief time there I learned so much, met so many wonderful people, and got a taste of life beyond the confines of North America and Europe. I am grateful for the opportunity that Endless gave me, and wish them only success in the future.

After a little over 6 years, I am embarking on a new adventure. Today is my last day at Canonical, it’s bitter sweet saying goodbye precisely because it has been such a joy and an honor to be working here with so many amazing, talented and friendly people. But I am leaving by choice, and for an opportunity that makes me as excited as leaving makes me sad.

Late last year Amazon introduce anew EC2 imagecustomized for Machine Learning (ML) workloads. To make things easier for data scientists and researchers, Amazon worked on including a selection of ML libraries into these images so they wouldn’t have to go through the process of downloading and installing them (and often times building them) themselves.

Java is a well established language for developing web applications, in no small part because of it’sindustry standard frameworkfor building them: Servlets and JSP. Another important part of this standard is the Web Archive, or WAR, file format, which defines how to provide a web application’s executables and how they should be run in a way that is independent of the application server that will be running them.